Movie review: Scorsese has his viewers suffer in Silence’

Monday

Jan 16, 2017 at 10:42 AMJan 16, 2017 at 10:42 AM

Ed Symkus More Content Now

As a longtime fan of director Martin Scorsese, I was pleasantly surprised over the past few years by his highly entertaining “The Wolf of Wall Street” and the underappreciated “Hugo.” But those films followed a lengthy period of below-par entries on his once-acclaimed resume. The confounding “Shutter Island” and the lavish but empty “The Aviator” had no business being mentioned in the same breath as his epic “Goodfellas” or his earlier, far more raw “Taxi Driver” and “Mean Streets.”

In tackling an adaptation of the 1966 Shusaku Endo novel, Scorsese, along with his off-and-on screenwriting collaborator Jay Cocks, visits familiar territory: His own and his characters’ difficult dealings with religion. It was there in “Bringing out the Dead,” in “Mean Streets,” and of course there was the extremely long “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

“Silence,” which at 241 minutes, runs just 3 minutes shorter than “Temptation,” takes place during the mid-17th century. There are two main locations: At the beginning, Portugal, where a pair of missionary priests, Rodrigues and Garrpe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver), are told that a letter has come from their long-missing mentor Ferreira (Liam Neeson), and soon after, in Japan, where Ferreira traveled to years earlier, with hopes of spreading Christianity throughout the Buddhist land.

The letter is distressing, saying only that Ferreira has given up the faith, which triggers the younger priests to set off to find him, journeying to a country where being a Christian could mean being tortured or put to death.

Aided by the Japanese guide Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), who regularly goes between being uncommunicative or drunk — or maybe he’s just crazy — they are smuggled into Japan, and brought to a secret church. This is where a group of Japanese villagers practice Christianity in secret, and in fear of being found out by authorities because Christianity is outlawed there.

It’s an intriguing story up to that point, and the film is a visual treat. It’s beautifully lit, sometimes by natural daylight, sometimes by candle or torch; sometimes shot in vast fields, sometimes on windswept shores.

But it all becomes a game of waiting, and of excruciatingly long sequences, some of which are accompanied by narration from Rodrigues, that are thick with religious atmosphere. The waiting is due to the fact that the two priests don’t even know if their mentor is still alive, and that’s it’s too dangerous for them to leave the little village because — wouldn’t you know it — an inquisitor and his band of brutes are out looking for Christians to torture or execute if they won’t symbolically renounce Christianity. So the priests and the villagers and, of course, the secret Christians in surrounding villages, are all forced to suffer for their beliefs.

This is a film where the drama is heavy and suffering is the motif. There is hostage-taking, there are crucifixions, there is drowning. Those are tough scenes to watch. Where the film could have and should have found its focus is in the commitment and travails of its two main characters. But they’re just not very interesting. They are, in fact, rather bland. The only fascinating character is their guide Kichijiro who, though his motivations aren’t fully explained, proves to be a complicated man with an extremely tortured soul due to some tragic happenings in his past. His story would make a much better film than that of the two priests.

Fans of Liam Neeson will be relieved to know that he does show up again near the end of the film, and though his character seems at peace, his brow has long been deeply furrowed. This is a very sad movie, one that lacks any promise of hope. The central message seems to be that you must suffer in the name of your chosen religion. But the question remains, to what purpose?